By George Ralph, RFA – According to Microsoft and 451 Research, most organisations are working with four cloud vendors, at least. Many firms are utilising public cloud services from the biggies like Amazon and Microsoft, but also want, or need more discrete services to house some applications, and for these services, will opt for private clouds. Today’s firms want applications that bring them business benefits, and if they need to bring on board other cloud services to house them, or to cope with the workload, that’s what they do. Our customers want infrastructure that just works as it should. They don’t really care what or where it is, as long as it is safe, secure, redundant, compliant and flexible.
Yes, it’s a complex set up, especially when you add multiple software-as-a-service products into the mix, there’s a clear need for a simple way to manage the public and private cloud offerings with a single interface. We partnered with both Microsoft and Amazon to give our customers the flexibility and price they want.
With GDPR and MiFID II fast approaching, firms will need to ensure that their cloud providers, whether public, private or both, can ensure compliance. For example, European customers’ data needs to be housed and processed on a cloud in Europe, with no chance that the data will travel outside of the region. Data must be kept for the duration of its life and no longer, which means that cloud providers must be transparent and accessible. This is where a specialist wrap around cloud service can come into its own, ensuring that transparency and allowing reporting on the information that the regulators will need. In addition, data protection and security is a big issue, with a spate of recent ICO fines levied on firms who haven’t taken adequate steps to protect their customers’ data.
Gartner predicts that the multi-cloud market will be worth $240 billion next year because it mirrors the way customers work, adding applications and services as needs change and grow. Multi-cloud suits the flexible nature of business today and it isn’t practical for firms to start from the ground up. RFA’s wrap around solution is going from strength to strength as it remove some of the complexities firms are facing.
